Corrupt AU3 (blockfiles) and ballooning filesize?

Hey all,

In a bit of a bind here with a large project I was editing. I foolishly saved and closed the project before exporting a .wav of both tracks, and now when I try to open the .aup3 file I receive this error:

{
“timestamp”: 1642187027,
“event_id”: “e03ab02581f0d54b914b971b4d812092”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.1.3”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Windows”,
“version”: “10.0.22000”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “Error_Opening_Project”,
“value”: “Project is corrupt\n(Unable to work with the blockfiles)”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false,
“data”: {
“sqlite3.query”: “DELETE FROM sampleblocks WHERE NOT inset(blockid);”,
“sqlite3.rc”: “11”,
“sqlite3.context”: “ProjectGileIO::GetBlob”,
“log”: “(Unable to work with the blockfiles)\n11:03:47: Loaded 83 string Kb in size\n11:03:47: sqlite3 message: (11) database corruption at line 66843 of [1b256d97b5]\n11:03:47: sqlite3 message: (11) database corruption at line 66993 of [1b256d97b5]\n11:03:47: sqlite3 message: (11) statement aborts at 8: [DELETE FROM sampleblocks WHERE NOT inset(blockid);] database disk image is malformed\n11:03:47: DBConnection SetDBError\n\tErrorCode: 11\n\tLastError: Project is corrupt\n(Unable to work with the blockfiles)\n\tLibraryError: database disk image is malformed\n”
}
}
}
]
}
}

I immediately ran a chkdsk on the drive this project is on, but it came up clean. I also noticed that the project file itself was now roughly 25GB (!) which seems hugely inflated, even though it was a very long project.

Is there anything I can do? If I could even just extract my recording, that would be extremely helpful.

This size may pose a problem.

See if you can’t zip up the file and post it on a public file sharing service. If not, try again with winrar.

Post (or PM me) a link and I’ll take a look at the project.

seems hugely inflated, even though it was a very long project.

What’s very long?

Audacity works internally at 32-bit floating format, and yes, that can be significantly larger than the same material at audio CD file standard (16-bit). It will be massively worse if you started with MP3 or other compressed files.

There is a caution about those. If you use MP3 or other compressed files in a show, you can’t make a new MP3 without the sound quality getting worse. MP3 format is a time bomb.

I foolishly saved and closed the project before exporting a .wav of both tracks

You should have WAVs of all original work, all the raw recordings, interviews, etc.

The up side is that’s the last time you make that mistake.

Koz

Thanks a ton! I’ll compress it and see where the best place to upload is, then shoot you a PM.

The project is about 3 hours and 40 minutes currently. It didn’t start from MP3, and for reference similar projects that clocked in at roughly the same time have uncorrupted .AUP3 files sitting around 2-4GB, which is what makes me think 25GB is an outlier.

I know, I know. Normally exporting the raw files as .wav is the first thing I do, but in this case life happened and I had to leave to go take care of something else and had forgotten by the time I came back. This is the first time I’ve had a project file corrupt on me like this; in other similar situations the old project file structure held up just fine. It is what it is!

Looks like I can’t send PMs yet, so here’s a link to a zipped file. Thanks a ton for taking a look at this! I’d be happy to reimburse you as thanks for your time/data. If it saves any time, the only thing I actually need is the top track as I do have an export of the bottom track.

Assuming we can recover the file, I’ll likely do this to save both space and time. Downloading now… :smiley:

Lovely! Thanks so much again for taking a look.

So the rescued file wasn’t much smaller that your original file so, as you suggested, I deleted all the tracks but the first and the file size came down dramatically! I have uploaded this trimmed file and PM’d you the link. :smiley:

Thank you so, so much! You’re a hero. :smiley:

:blush: (blush!) You’re welcome. :smiley: